UX Designers, Stop the Jargon Abuse

“On this screen, we have added a photo gallery. You can clearly see how it is inspired by Don Norman’s first level of visceral design, and how it utilizes some foundational Gestalt principles, helping achieve our graceful degradation strategy for pre-webkit browsers. It’s very gestural, intuitive, designed for millennials.”

One of the problems of using UX jargon in a conversation is assuming everyone in the room will understand what “graceful degradation” means in that context, or that they have read the same Don Norman book you have. If they don’t understand what you are referring to, they will not always interrupt you to ask. Most people feel embarrassed to confess what they don’t know. And this can bring catastrophic consequences for your project.

In many cases, the use of jargon is merely accidental — sometimes terms like “UI” or “parallax” will naturally come up as designers present the work to clients who have no idea what that means. In other cases, it’s a defense mechanism. Using complex words make people sound smart; make them sound like the perfect specialist in that topic. Which then enables them to charge more to solve the problem.

Graphic design will save the world right after rock and roll does. ― David Carson

As a new technical term comes out, hundreds of courses, talks, e-books and blog posts start to pop up — claiming to teach you everything you need to know about [buzzword goes here]. You spend tons of money trying to catch up (“early bird tickets for only $999!”). When you finally overcome your impostor syndrome and feel confident enough to repeat that term out loud, the first thing you do is to update your Linkedin profile with that keyword — eventually fueling that same anxiety in other people. (Source: thenextweb.com)